Every once in a while I hunt around for applications that support my iSight camera. Tonight I found a plugin for VLC that adds support for IIDC FireWire cameras. The information is at: http://dc1394-vlc.sourceforge.net/ I then discovered that the module is included in mainstream as of 0.8.6, though I couldn't find any information about it on VLC's site. However, the current ebuild doesn't support the configure option to enable it. So I added support. I'll attach a diff to vlc-0.8.6_p18636.ebuild
Created attachment 110661 [details, diff] adds ieee1394 support to vlc
when using dv input I get these in dmesg output : raw1394: WARNING - Program "vlc" uses unsupported isochronous request types which will be removed in a next kernel release raw1394: Update your software to use libraw1394's newer interface moreover I've not managed to get any image, perhaps I'm doing something wrong there and with dc1394 I get : [00000293] dc1394 demuxer error: unable to get camera info [00000293] dc1394 demuxer error: couldn't stop the camera perhaps my camera is not compatible with dc1394, I have no clue there. note that Kino works out of the box thus I'm not going to add those useflags to vlc until I can make sure it's not broken and working perfectly.
Created attachment 116774 [details, diff] adds dc1394 support to vlc
There are two types of ieee1394 video. DV is a compressed video stream used with camcorders. IIDC is an uncompressed real-time stream used with industrial and scientific digital cameras. As it happens, Apple's iSight FireWire Webcam uses IIDC. VLC uses libdv and libavc1394 for DV camcorders. It uses libdc1394 for IIDC digital cameras. libdc1394 won't work with DV camcorders and libdv/libavc1394 won't work with IIDC cameras. The only applications I've found that work with IIDC cameras are VLC, Coriander, and Ekiga. Both Coriander and Ekiga require a GUI. Kino does not work with IIDC cameras. I've updated the patch against vlc-0.8.6b. DV support has been dropped. I don't have a DV camcorder to test against. Going by Alexis Ballier's message, the DV code in VLC is outdated. IIDC support is turned on with the dc1394 USE flag. I thought it best that the name of the USE flag reflect the lack of DV support. I haven't had any errors using this with my Apple FireWire iSight camera.
thanks Christopher for the explanations, patch applied ;)
